Make local democracy the default for students who moved.
Roughly 5 million American college students live in a state different from where they grew up. Students turn out, too: about 76% were registered in 2024, and roughly 7 in 10 registered students cast a ballot (CIRCLE, Tufts). What almost nobody hands them is the ballot for the place they actually live now. That's the gap we work on.
Why we exist
The civic infrastructure that exists for college students is almost entirely focused on absentee ballots and home-state voting. That's important, but it leaves you disconnected from the city, county, and state where you spend 9 months of the year. Nobody tells you who your mayor is, when the school board votes, or what's on the next ballot. So the local races that decide rent rules, transit, and policing happen without the information ever reaching you. Students who get the dates show up. Getting the dates is the hard part.
VoteU flips the default. We onboard you to your college address, walk you through real residency rules, and surface every ballot you can legally cast where you live. No political content, no candidate endorsements, no party signups. Just the calendar, the deadlines, and the links.
What we are not
- We're not a PAC, a campaign, or a vendor to either.
- We don't tell you who to vote for or how to think about an issue.
- We don't sell, share, or rent your data to advertisers, parties, or anyone.
- We're not affiliated with any school or government body.
How we're funded
VoteU is an independent nonprofit project. Funding comes from small individual donations and non-partisan civic-engagement grants. Operating costs are minimal. We run on email, a small hosted datastore, and donated time. Anything we raise above costs goes to expanding state coverage and translating the product into Spanish and Mandarin.
The legal bit, in plain English
Every state has slightly different rules about whether a student can use their dorm address to register. We surface what we know on each state page, but we are not a law firm. For the actual rules, talk to your state's Secretary of State or a local election official. Both are linked from your state page.
Get involved
We'd love help from organizers on campus, designers, election lawyers, and anyone who wants to write copy that actually sounds like a 19-year-old.
VoteU is run by a student, not a party, a PAC, or a campaign. It was built after watching out-of-state classmates miss election after election they were fully entitled to vote in, not because they didn’t care, but because nobody told them the deadlines.
Every date on this site links to the state election authority it came from, so you never have to take our word for it. If something here is wrong, we want to know: the fastest way to reach us is the address in the footer.